Scholarship of teaching and learning

Iterative and incremental evaluation of student learning projects in Australian academic libraries

From 2015 – 2018 I have been involved in a research project with Dr Karen Miller from the Curtin University Library. This focussed on student-learning projects offered in university libraries across Australia. We invited all academic libraries in Australia to participate in our survey.

The specific learning initiative needed to involve all of the following:

student engagement in a learning activity (students had to actually do something as part of the programme, rather than sit in an audience as passive listeners).

introduction of substantially different content or delivery methods when compared to other projects or programmes within the five years before the initiative was run

was delivered between 1 July 2010 and 30 June 2015

We were specifically researching the time points at which library staff evaluated their project, the methods they used, and whether they iteratively and incrementally applied this knowledge.

This research will be presented as a fully-written peer-reviewed conference paper, entitled “Iterative and incremental evaluation works for software development, but can it be good for student learning initiatives in Australian academic libraries?” at the VALA: Libraries, Technologies and the Future conference in Melbourne on 14 February 2018. This paper will be re-written and submitted to a scholarly journal during 2018.